Fiction > Book editions > London, 1885 - Dynamiter

124 NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS.
like a drunken man; the passers-by regarding him with
eyes in which he read, as in a glass, an image of the
terror and horror that dwelt within his own.
' I am afraid you are very ill, sir,' observed a woman,
stopping and gazing hard in his face. ' Can I do anything
to help you ? '
'Ilir said M'Guire. '0 God!' And then, re-
covering some shadow of his self-command, ' Chronic,
madam,' said he : ' a long course of the dumb ague. But
since you are so compassionate— an errand that I lack
the strength to carry out,' he gasped — ' this bag to
Portman Square. O compassionate woman, as you hope
to be saved, as you are a mother, in the name of your
babes that wait to welcome you at home, O take this
bag to Portman Square ! I have a mother, too,' he
added, with a broken voice. 'Number 19, Portman
Square.'
I suppose he had expressed himself with too much
energy of voice ; for the woman was plainly taken with a
certain fear of him. ' Poor gentleman ! ' said she. ' If I
were you, I would go home.' And she left him standing
there in his distress.
' Home ! ' thought M'Guire, ' Vvdiat a derision ! '
What home was tliere for him, the victim of philan-
thropy ? He thought of his old mother, of his happy
youth ; of the hideous, rending pang of the explosion ; of
the possibility that he might not be killed, that he might
be cruelly mangled, crippled for life, condemned to life-
long pains, blinded perhaps, and almost surely deafened.
Ah, you spoke lightly of the dynamiter's peril ; but
even waiving death, have you realised what it is for a
fine, brave young man of forty, to be smitten suddenly
with deafness, cut off from all the music of life, and from
the voice of friendship, and love ? How little do we
realise the sufferings of others ! Even your brutal
Government, in the heyday of its lust for cruelty, though
it scruples not to hound the patriot with spies, to pack
the corrupt jury, to bribe the hangman, and to erect the
infamous gallows, would hesitate to inflict so horrible a
doom : not, I am well aware, from virtue, not from